Episode 19: Decolonizing Water Part 1
“Decolonization helps us to put into practice this theory which says: There is a better way for this world to function”
Cutcha Risling Baldy
A conversation with Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Humboldt State University) about land and water use futures, decolonization, and communities in California (Part 1/2). Released May 7, 2021.
guests on the show
Cutcha Risling Baldy
Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis, M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Literary Research from San Diego State University, and B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. Dr. Risling Baldy studies Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, and decolonization. Dr. Risling Baldy is the author of We Are Dancing For You: Native feminisms and the revitalization of women's coming-of-age ceremonies, which considers coming-of-age ceremonies in the context of decolonizing practice, ethnography, water, and gender. Learn more about Dr. Risling Baldy’s work here and follow her on Twitter.
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Kearns
Welcome to Water Talk. Today we're super excited to be talking with Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, who is Hoopa, Yurok, and Karuk and on the faculty at Humboldt State University. I first became familiar with Cutcha's work when I interviewed Melanie Yazzie, who at the time was on the faculty at UC Riverside and who is now at the University of New Mexico. Cutcha and Melanie collaborated on a water focused issue of the journal Decolonization. And that special issue has several really interesting articles in it, but one of the most interesting is the introduction that the two of them provide to the concept of decolonization. And so this episode really stemmed from an interest in how decolonization as a concept applies to water, in particular. Sam, Mallika, what did you all think about this particular episode?
Mallika Nocco
I really, really enjoyed this episode. And I'm so excited for everyone to engage with it and listen to Cutcha's expertise. One of my favorite parts to listen for is just this concept of land and how we think about land versus how we think about soil versus how we think about water. Myself and Sam are both faculty in a department here at UC Davis called the Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources. And I just had a chuckle because Cutcha just really points out and discusses how land really is inclusive of water. And water is really inclusive of land. And these two things are together as one thing, and we should be thinking about land as water. And I think that not thinking about it that way has gotten us into some problems. And I think that it's really wonderful and valuable to think of it as one concept when she talks about that it was one of my favorite moments.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, and I agree the way that she puts together these relationships of resources, it brings me really good memories of my childhood when I was back in Mexico, rural Mexico, in this town with my grandmom, seeing her being a part of the community, an active member of the community, having not the right, but the responsibility to take care of that community, of the resources, and so on. And Cutcha gives this friendly reminder that we are part of a society and our responsibility to communities is to be stewards of the land, the stewards of the water, and the relationships that you're mentioning that nothing is seen in isolation, that all of these are a related. I really enjoyed that part and also the ways of knowing and that there is a lot of value of the Indigenous people and their ways of knowing that we should pay closer attention.
Mallika Nocco
Yes, that has definitely been kind of a recurring theme on Water Talk is just thinking about and recognizing many different ways of knowing and many different types of expertise.
Faith Kearns
Well, without further ado, let's hear from Dr. Risling Baldy. We are so honored to have you as a guest on Water Talk. To start, we would just love to hear a little bit more about your background and your work.
Cutcha Risling Baldy
Thanks everyone for having me today. I'm Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy. I am the department chair and Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University. I'm also Hoopa, Yurok, and Karuk and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe, which is up here in Northern California. So, I'm very close to where my tribal peoples are in my homelands. I’m joining you today, though, from Wiyot homelands out in Potawat, which is near the Mad River.
I like working with people and communities to do things that can radically change our futures so that we can all live better lives. And lately, I've been saying so that we can all breathe. Because I mean, like where we've been coming down to, and many of the movements that we're seeing are, we need to all just be able to breathe on this planet right now. And that can mean so many things in several different social justice circles that I think we'll focus on. I primarily do a lot of my work with California Indians and California Indian communities in what is currently called the state of California, right, and just trying to find ways to call attention to the political issues that we still face. Because I think a lot of people think of us only in the past, right? Or as like people who are only really of the past and there are so many things that we are leading the way on when it comes to climate change, politics, culture, cultural revitalization, land use, and what this future can look like.
Faith Kearns
Thank you. That's a really beautiful way to describe your life's work, I think. To move right into the water stuff, you co-edited a special issue of the journal Decolonization with Melanie Yazzie, who is an assistant professor now at the University of New Mexico and co-founder of the Red Nation, that is focused on water in particular. And so, before we talk about that special issue and water, I'm wondering if you could talk a little more generally about what people mean by decolonization for listeners who might not be familiar with that term?
Cutcha Risling Baldy
I mean, yeah, of course. I think, first of all, I love working with Melanie. And if people haven't looked at her work, or the things that she's doing, definitely know she's my colleague and my friend who keeps me honest and radical and pushes me a lot when I'm doing my thinking. And I think that that's really important that you have people like that in your lives, because I think people when hear me talk, they're like, gosh, you're so radical. And I'm like, no, I have the really cool radical people I get to work with, who remind me that there's more work that I can be doing on myself, right, and the ways I think, so I want to put that plug in there.
I think that we're very fortunate that we do this work in decolonization, and have been able to be associate editors and editors of the Decolonization journal, which is trying to theorize what decolonization is. Where I usually begin with people is like, it's not a set definition. There's not like one thing where I can come in and be like, this is decolonization. Because it is a complex theory. It's a theory of what we're supposed to be doing to move in new directions and to build like radical imagined futures and to make the impossible possible.
I think that theorizing has to come from Indigenous peoples in spaces, because for far too long, we've been talked about as if we don't have deep theory about how the world is supposed to function. But everything we do is theory or our stories are always theory, our language holds so much of our theory, like the ways in which we view the world including our ceremonies, are theory, enacted in praxis. And decolonization helps us to put into praxis this theory, which says, there's a better way for this world to function.
What I always say to people is the system that we live in right now, settler colonialism, is a system that values capitalism and empire and extraction and imperialism and doesn't actually make a lot of sense. And I think we all feel that as people on this planet living in this world, many of us are like this doesn't make sense. Because if 99% of us are in the experience of not being valued or uplifted, which is true, and then 1% of us have most of the capital, most of the power, we know that doesn't make any sense for how a society is supposed to function. So we live in this system that makes no sense to us. And we constantly walk around feeling that kind of heavy weight of why is this so hard?
I think part of it is like we're struggling against a system that isn't working and has never worked and was designed to do very key things. So, decolonization comes in and says, this makes no sense. What are we going to do instead? Let's do something else. That can be kind of scary, because we get taught that we live in systems forever, and that there's never overturning of systems. But decolonization is like we're going to come in and do something else. And that something else is going to be based on knowledges that truly value things like respect and reciprocity, long term thinking, more than human relatives, and moving out of the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples, which has been fundamental to the system that we live under, pushing back against hetero-patriarchy, all the things that when you start to talk to people, they’re like it feels pretty good like that, I actually would be down for that. And then you get to the heart of decolonization, which is like, cool.
So, you have to start by giving the land back. And then people go, oh, wait a minute. That's scary. I don't know why that's the scariest part. I actually think that's should be the easiest part because the rest of it is going to take so much work, right? But when you start going at the heart of decolonization needs to be land return, that's what you're signing up for. If you're coming into a space and you're like, I'm working to decolonize, I want to decolonize, this is fundamentally what you're signing up for is land return land return to Indigenous peoples, the return of Idigenous land and life and a lot of this theory about how decolonization needs to move beyond a discussion of decolonizing our mind or decolonizing our educational systems to the practice of land return.
This really comes from Eve Tuck and K. Wang Yang's, very foundational article out of the Decolonization journal called “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” And then, I think, the future theorists who are coming into decolonization are saying at the heart of what we're signing up for is land return. That's the radical vision. And we're moving in that direction. And that's what you're signing up for when you're starting to talk about what decolonization is. And a lot of that is really centered around land, life, and water. Because for us, water is land, land is water, like they're all tied so closely together.
We can see that, and I always tell people, the work I do in decolonization is about how allow ourselves to say out loud the things we want to come into being. And how we allow ourselves to radically imagine a future without dams, a future where everybody can breathe, a future where we are doing cultural burning, a future where everybody has a home, let's see what that really looks like for us.
People might come to you and say that's impossible. But I can tell stories, in my own lifetime, of really amazing things that have now happened, that are decolonizing movements. I always say to people, I have seen impossible things happen in my lifetime. So that’s howI know it's possible.
Faith Kearns
Thank you so much for that very rich definition or process-based definition anyway. I appreciate the shout out to Melanie — I did a two-part interview with her a couple years ago, and there is a lot of richness there. So, one of the ideas that you and Melanie put forward in that in that intro to the special issue of Decolonization centered with the idea of radical relationality. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what you mean by the concept of relationality. And then more specifically, what the addition of radical to the term relationality really means.
Cutcha Risling Baldy
I think when we're talking about like Indigenous ways of knowing, right, and just basic knowing and being, we always conceptualize the world as in relationship. So, everything's in relationship, you can't divorce one thing of another. And you don't think about things without the relationship that it has everything else. Vine Deloria Jr. talks a lot about this, when he's really kind of taking apart the different concepts of science, and you have Western science and Indigenous science. Western science really says we can look at things in a vacuum very separate of everything, bring it down to it's just very basic parts and we can tell you how that works.
Then Vine Deloria comes in and says, well Indigenous science would say, why would you do that everything exists in relationship to something else. So, you need to know how it works in relationship. And we were talking about relationships of ecosystems in totality. I mean, human beings are a part of that, too, right? We're not separate of the ecosystem; we are part of it. And we are a part of how that's supposed to function. And so that relationship exists within us. Now when we are unbalanced in that relationality, when we center ourselves, when human beings, say we think of humanity as something other than in relationship to everything around us, then we see the imbalance that happens.
It lends itself toward these ecological disasters that are happening all over the world, the overuse of resources, the idea that somehow we're gonna fix it later. I hear that a lot from people where they're like science will fix it later. And we can do all this stuff now and we'll find some kind of really special way to fix it. And I always point out to them, 55 years ago, they came up to our area and they really wanted gold. One of the things they started doing was pouring mercury into the water to get at the gold, and we are still dealing with that today. Science cannot fix that. If we can't fix that problem that's 155 years old, what makes you think we're going to be able to fix this problem. We need to be thinking about this long term.
So, we think of everything in relationship, and we don't divorce all the things that you have to think about when you're doing that. And then we think about ourselves in relationship and what Vine Deloria constantly pointed out is Indigenous peoples don't say it's my right, this is my right, they say what is my responsibility? So, we think of the world as a sense of the responsibility that we carry in relationship.
What Melanie and I were really talking about when we're talking about radical relationality is to not apologize for that. As you are thinking about how you're going to both talk about, write about, formulate policy, law, whatever it looks like, to not apologize for that interrelationship between all beings. To come into spaces and just be like, this is about our relationships. And we have to build those in radical ways, across borders, across cultures, even when it seems like it's an impossible task that we are taking up, that we're still going to build a relationship with each other that says we will support each other in the impossible tasks that we're going to do.
And we have to do it in meaningful ways. So, for instance, I think about my own people in this area, who, during the Gold Rush, as there are laws and things passed, where if we did our own ceremonies, we could be killed, murdered, kidnapped, sold into slavery, and yet they still held those ceremonies. And what you see are in archives, you see them saying, we did all these things, we still showed up, and they didn't just show up, like hundreds of them showed up to still do this ceremony. And to me, that's a radical relationality moment, because these are multiple tribes who see what's happening. And instead of saying, we will disconnect from this, they all still show up. And they still make sure that they do it, because to them, that is how they maintain their relationship to the land. That's how they maintain their relationship to their river. That's how they maintain what they're supposed to do in this area. And they don't stop.
A lot of what I have written about before has been about these laws and policies constantly passed that try to keep us from reconnecting to our water, or reconnecting to our places where we would gather for basketry. But that does not mean we ever stopped. And actually, we've always been in those places anyway. And so to continue that movement of saying, do we do we need government sanctions? And do we need government support for what we're doing on a United States level? Or can we support each other through a relationship that we develop, and then uplift each other so that we make sure those things still happen?
I think at a point, the relationships that we develop with the land and the water and the places that we exist, right, like the deer and the frog and coyote, right? Like all these things, it feels very radical to us right now. It is the way we're supposed to live in the world. And I think we have to just say that this is how we think and this is what is going to actually get us out of this. All the problems we have right now, I always say to people you're not going to solve climate change if you don't start thinking we have to save the fish. Or the fish need to be centered in this. W
When we talk about water policy in my class, I always ask them if the rule is whoever's the oldest gets the first rights to the water — if it's first in time, first in line for water rights in California — then who's the oldest in this situation, and they know, Indigenous peoples. And I was it's salmon. It's fish, they've been around for millions of years, they should have first rights to the water. And we can't apologize for that point of view, because we are their voice, we are the people who are responsible for them. And that's our relationship to them.
We can't come into spaces and be like, I know, this is gonna feel weird for you to hear. But salmon have rights to the water, uhuh, we just got to come in and be like salmon have rights to the water. We are not the center of the universe here. And actually, when we do that, we support everybody, because salmon are so central to how the whole ecosystem functions. So, we've been thinking about that since the beginning. Now, I think we come in and say, let's practice it. Let's practice it again. Let's not apologize for it. Let's just put it into practice.
Faith Kearns
That's a fantastic offering. The other thing that was really interesting to me from your article is this idea that decolonization is perhaps not so much a destination as it is a process of struggle. And you all are pretty clear about centering that idea that struggle itself is relational. And I'm just wondering why it was important to you to struggle or to center struggle in decolonial efforts?
Cutcha Risling Baldy
Sometimes I think it's because people think if it's not easy, that means it's not correct, or it shouldn't happen. I think when you start to explain to people what decolonization is, they want it to be a straight line. And they're sort of like, explain to me how this is going to work in a very clear way so that nobody gets hurt or offended or left out, and if we don't have all the answers to that, then they're like, then I guess it's not a thing, right? But to point out that there's going to be many curvy ways of getting to an endpoint, and that that should be an important part of how we learn, and that we learn together in struggle, and that we are struggling, fundamentally, we are struggling against a system that has been set up to prevent decolonization from happening, and that that struggle is real.
I think sometimes people will think or they'll say, there's so much support right now for anti-racist work or decolonizing work you guys have all the centering in this discussion. But the struggle is against an entire system and we need to know that we are in that struggle together and that we are willing to join up into that struggle, because sometimes I think people get a little bit veered off the path into I'm going to like decolonize this colonial institution, and you kind of go, well, you can't really do that, you'd have to dismantle the entire thing, because the whole thing is built on these fundamental things that we cannot bring into a new system. So, you're not decolonizing the institution, you're struggling against what's happening there. You need to build something new. And we have to do that together.
I always tell people, if decolonization was easy, we would have done it 500 years ago, I think we knew this is gonna be a long process, we signed up for it. What I love about Indigenous peoples is from the beginning, I think the minute that you had somebody walking off the boat into southern California and being like, we're here to build a mission, you had any people going, well, we're starting to decolonize. Like, that's now our new thing. And I think we knew it was gonna be a constant process of how we were doing this, but nobody ever stopped envisioning, pushing back, or thinking about what that could look like.
I will tell you for the small steps that we've been able to make forward in certain areas, they might feel small and insignificant, sometimes in the grand scheme of things. But when I think about the struggles of my great grandfather and what he wrote about in his own papers about living through the Gold Rush, and what that meant for his family, and what he envisioned for us, as people, we're doing an okay job. We have to keep pushing forward for those things and keep saying, again, out loud, the things that we want, and then understanding that we might be signing up for a long-term struggle together, but that if we can radically support each other in ways that beyond showing up at all the movements and things, also being gentle with each other, being understanding of each other, caring for each other in times where it feels like too much.
I always say to people, there's a lot of things that my when people are like you're always struggling and pushing and doing all these things to try to make it better. And then, what's the support you get? And I said, well, sometimes I'll come home, and my husband will make me a grilled cheese sandwich. And that's what I need. And that, to me, is participating in the process of struggling against the settler colonial system, because I need it, I need that moment of radical care. And I think that's something else that we think about when we're signing up to struggle together, we're signing up to be able to do those moments, just as much as the big things that you might see on the cover of a book or a magazine or something.
Faith Kearns
That's a super helpful grounding, especially the intergenerational perspective, which the older I get, the more I appreciate. It's really interesting to me that water does figure so prominently in both academic discussions and organizing efforts, including things like the No Dakota Access Pipeline and many other struggles. Why do you think water does appear central to so many decolonization struggles?
Cutcha Risling Baldy
At the heart of it, right, water is life. I mean, that becomes something I think is pretty central to a lot of Indigenous people’s spaces. I don't think that it's not just because it's trendy, or something that had come up in a bigger movement, I think it's fundamentally been something that we've really thought about for a number of years. I remember reading papers by Indigenous scholars from the early years of Native American Studies really saying water is what we need to remember is centered in what we do. And then we center it in our culture and our ceremonies and in the way we talk in our languages.
In like the Hoopa language, we have different words for water depending on what it's for. So, we have the water we drink, we have the water we see like in a river, but we also have the water we pray to. We have these different ways of talking about water because we have centralized this understanding of how important it is to life. And we want people to have that value. Our ceremonies reconnect them in really important ways to water. We have la boat dance ceremony where they're in the water and they're getting used to that, and we have our women's coming of age ceremony where they're connecting to water through ceremonial bathing, right? So, they have to be able to get in the water and they pray to the water and they talk to the water and reconnect to it.
I think we've grown up understanding this space is so important to us, in Hoopa we have our directions from the point of view of the water. So, it's either upriver or downriver, away from the river, or toward the river. And that's how we view the world. We talked about it a little bit in the article where I mentioned instead of talking about as a worldview, it's more like water view. And so, we look at how the water views you, not how you view the water. I think that that recenters your whole world, in terms of what you understand about what's important and then we grow up with this river that runs directly through the entirety of our Valley. But we don't understand it as a singular entity. We know it feeds into the Klamath River, which feeds into the ocean, we connect that primarily through our salmon and seeing the interconnection of how our salmon run through the water.
So, our theorizing about water becomes across borders, across lives and times. And we think about the way it feeds the entirety of the land, and what many people who grew up in my area, but I see this across Indigenous spaces, is we've always conceptualized our river. So, we get taught from the time we're very little, that river is like the vein, it is the artery of our land, it carries everything that we need to make this land work well. So, if the river is sick, the land will be sick, the people will be sick, animals will be sick, so we take care of the water. And that's the artery. And it helps us to understand, well, you would never like dam up your artery, because it would affect the entire rest of the system in which you exist. It's the same thing that we think about our rivers, you don't think about it as local control of what I need right now, you think what does this mean for everyone? Right, like for everybody.
I think you can't help but understand that on a fundamental theoretical level for Indigenous peoples that they've always been theorizing water as so important to land, life, culture, ceremony, and it's so deeply ingrained in what they do that it almost feels like, well, yeah, that's just how it is. When you try to explain it to people, and then going, I've never thought I don't learn about water that way, or that's not the way that water is centered in my life. And you're kind of like, how could you not? Like this is actually just really central to how we think about the whole world altogether. And now I think with the movements that we've seen, that are popping up, what you see is that our caring for water is not just about us.
So, we don't say if we don't have water, we are going to falter even though we know that's true. We're also thinking really big scale, the way it affects the land, the way it affects lthe animals, the way that it affects our future, all of our future generations. So, we're thinking very grand. And when we think about what's the movement for water, I think sometimes people doing the policy around water aren't thinking that big term, we're also thinking about the ocean. I get very frustrated by California politicians, when they're making comments, and they'll go we lose too much water to the ocean. And that's our problem. And I'm just like, what are you talking about? The ocean also needs water. And you don't even know what the effects are going to be if suddenly we have no water going to the ocean.
So to decenter this idea of like humans, capitalism. and industry being what uses water and instead saying, the whole system needs this water to live. And we can see that in the way that watersheds work, in the way that rivers work. We've always been talking about the planet as a living entity that we are caring for, that we are a part of, and we see our rivers very much in that way.